I am the president of Metis Strategy, a CIO advisory firm that I founded in 2001. I have advised many of the best chief information officers at multi-billion dollar corporations in the United States and abroad. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, CIO Insight, Information Week and several other periodicals. I am also the author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation (Wiley Press, September 2014) and of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Wiley Press, December 2009), a book on leading IT practices that has sold over 12,000 copies around the world. Since 2008, I have moderated a widely listened to podcast entitled “The Forum on World Class IT,” which features a wide array of IT thought-leaders, and is available at www.forumonworldclassit.com on a biweekly basis. I have been the keynote speaker at a host of corporate conferences and universities in the US, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, China, India, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. You can reach me at peter.high [at] metisstrategy.com or on Twitter @WorldClassIT

From CIO To President Of Fifth Third Bancorp: The Beyond CIO Series

Greg Carmichael, Former CIO and Current President and COO of Fifth Third Bancorp

Greg Carmichael was the chief information officer at multiple industrial behemoths before joining Fifth Third BancorpFifth Third Bancorp as CIO in 2003. Although Fifth Third was smaller, revenue-wise, than was his prior employer, Emerson ElectricEmerson Electric, Carmichael was attracted to the challenge of learning a new industry that was very information dependent. He wove himself deeply into the operations of the business, and was able to drive significant business value from IT. Carmichael’s accomplishments have been rewarded as he has risen to the role of president and chief operation officer of Fifth Third Bancorp. In this interview, Carmichael provides advice for others who might wish to follow in his footsteps.

(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please visit this link. The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here. If you are interested in future articles in the series with executives from companies like HP, Symantec, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, among others, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Greg, you were a long-time IT executive at major industrial companies like General ElectricGeneral Electric and Emerson. You then joined your first financial services company when you became the CIO of Fifth Third Bancorp in 2003. How did you approach this new experience in a new industry?

Greg Carmichael: Truth be told, GE and Emerson are each such diverse businesses that I had a series of new businesses to learn about within each company. Therefore, I came to Fifth Third with a pretty solid ability to learn about business drivers quickly, and to establish trusted relationships with new colleagues early on.

The key to any executive’s success is an understanding of the business that they are in. I dove right in when I joined Fifth Third and got to know the executives around the business, and talked to them about their plans, the opportunities they foresaw in the future, and I went to work translating the relevant points into solutions that IT could offer to bring those business plans and opportunities to life.

I have always focused on the creative use of technology to help meet needs. Technology for technology’s sake is pretty useless. Technology that helps the top and bottom lines is a recipe for success. It requires understanding the business drivers, as well as getting to know your colleagues well enough to help fix issues that they’ve identified.

PH: Across such a diverse range of experiences, what commonalities do you see from the various CIO roles you have had?

GC: As is often said in GE, “the only constant at GE is change.” That is an important and telling mantra that means that no matter what function you are in, you need to be adaptable. This applied to IT.

I have come to believe that one of the highest callings for an IT department is to foster speed. IT needs to help the corporation get more done more quickly within the allotted budget. This means being more agile. It means collaborating with executives from across the organization and doing away with the siloed mentality.

Additionally, you need to harness data to help make better decisions. This is an important role for IT executives to play. That said, it is also important to trust your gut so you can make quick decisions. The decisions may not always be right, but so long as you can make changes quickly once hypotheses are proven wrong, this is a solid path to success.

Lastly, in any industry, it’s all about the IT talent that you have. You will never be successful as a business leader without it. If you make a bad hiring decision, you have to fix it right away. Too many people let these decisions go, and push off the inevitable. I think it is important for the sake of the team’s success to make these decisions early so that one bad apple does not spoil the bunch.

As you build a team, hiring for technical literacy is important, of course, but it is more important to identify people who can apply technology to solve business problems.

PH: What was it about the CIO role that prepared you for your current role as president and chief operating officer of the bank?

GC: I think there are a lot of skills that the CIO traditionally possesses that apply to other roles, as well. CIOs are generally good at risk management, developing contingency plans, and developing back-up plans. Solid CIOs have an ability to learn quickly, and to make quality decisions while applying the learnings from areas that have not been successful so that mistakes are only made once.

The CIO role is also ideal in getting to know each business unit intimately. By becoming a problem solver for each, the CIO is ideally suited to take on greater responsibilities, and that was my experience. Therefore, the COO role is in some ways the logical next position for a CIO who has focused on creating value for each business unit in the company.

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